Harold Bloom is the distinguished and idiosyncratic Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and author of the renowned 'Anxiety Of Influence'. In this book he argues the legitimacy of the western literary canon and vigorously defends it against the forces that are trying to diminish it, including cultural materialists, zealous multiculturalists and revisionist neoconservatives.
Concentrating on twenty-six writers, he places Shakespeare at the centre of the western canon seeing him as the touchstone for all writers who have come before and after him: Milton, Johnson, Goethe, Joyce, and Beckett were all indebted to him; Tolstoy and Freud rebelled against him; while Dante, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, and Proust are exquisite examples of how canonical writing is born of originality fused with tradition.
Illuminating and passionate, this is a brilliant and provocative celebrations of the great books that form the western literary tradition.
